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One might question whether you read the sources you cited, as opposed to simply linking terms you heard a convincing speaker use one day.

Manifest destiny has little to do with Christians spreading the word across the world. While the idea existed that it was ordained by the Christian God, Manifest Destiny was the idea that Americans were charged with expanding capitalism, democracy, and even the American government to all of North and Latin America.

"Christian Talibans" is a lovely buzz word... but wholly inappropriate as Taliban is neither an adjective or common noun. It is instead a proper noun describing a terroristic dictatorship that was formerly the ruling body of Iraq and had strong control over Afghanistan and is currently engaging in guerrilla and terrorist assaults to prevent the peoples of those regions from asserting their own power. The Taliban is 100% radicalize Islam in origin and operation. Associating Christians in this way is simply disingenuous. If you want a true analogy, try the Irish Republican Army.

Further, dominionists don't say in any way that they want to forcefully convert any one or that they intend to mass murder any people who will not believe in their exact form of Christianity. Reconstructionists have nothing to do with government or militant attitudes. They're basically the root of the protestant movement away from the control of the Holy See (the pope). Reconstructionism was in fact a break from religious control and not an instantiation of it.

Finally, using a blog to support a radical opinion is about as useful as using a tissue to clean up hurricane Katrina. However, reading it, you'll notice all references to slavery and the law of God are from the Old Testament. If you know anything about modern day apologetics and theism, its been generally accepted for several centuries that the coming of Christ eliminated the "old law" and brought His own based entirely around the premise of John 14:6, "I am the way, the truth and the life. None shall come to the father except through me." Which can in no way be interpreted as Christians enslaving other men.

I take exception to you singling out Republican's here. Democrats, far more often then the big red, seek public outcry to get their policies passed. Sure, the big elephant in the room likes to point out all the big nasties and immoral things that we do, but the asses like telling us that every little thing we do is killing the polar bears. Between sharing my wealth with the inner city poor who can't stop having children and raping my wallet for gas/energy costs... I think I'll take the moral guilt over liberal idiocy any day.

theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."

Lets hope we see the smallest amount of value before the American economy completely implodes.

I would love to debate the merits of individual policies all day long. Between the stimulus, bailouts and healthcare we've already got a hole that can't be filled that was dug by policies that were short sighted and badly engineered in the first place (yes, some from Bush). Sure, they all have redeeming principles in them, but the actual implementation leaves much to be desired. All of that aside, Obama's biggest problem is one of scope. You can't quadruple the national deficit in one year and add nearly $5 trillion (number from the CBO) to the national debt in as many years and then go on to (at a minimum - again numbers from the CBO & WSJ) double the energy costs for the AVERAGE American... We've already passed the legislation necessary to completely destroy the economy... this will just help it come faster.

Obama and his administration seem to only consider the ideal situation... the one in which their policies work out exactly as they intended... unfortunately they aren't and will continue to go awry, cap&trade included.

I, like you, see our destruction of the environment as a debt to future generations and actions must be taken to protect the world for the future, however, please consider the fact that our children won't have a future if we've spent out economy into oblivion. If you are ok with the United States going up to 25% unemployment again, people by the tens-of-millions living on the streets on in shelters, and your children having little to no education (or an advantage really) to speak of all for the protection of the environment, then I guess such considerations need not be made. I, however, will give my votes and support to people who are willing to find a hybrid between prosperity and environmentalism.

That's right... ignore any viable argument against your world view an insatiable desire to be "good willed" and "right" at any cost... just accuse the person as having no basis for argument and they'll go away? Is that what liberalism teaches now a-days?

Rosa Parks' argument was that she was no less a human being than the nice white people who got to sit at the front and that no matter how you argue separate is not equal which therefore gave her the same natural right to sit at the front of the bus as the WASPs.

Are you intending to argue that listening to music that was produced by someone else (at a cost to the producer) is an inherent natural right of human beings and therefore downloading it (without compensation to the producer) constitutes no moral or ethical injustice?

I understand the anti-Microsoft sentiment. Being in IT and software development I tend to share a lot of it... but if you're going to spread hate, try to make sure your facts/analogies are in the ballpark of being accurate

Windows comes complete with door locks and windows, its the $1000 Bose surround sounds with bluetooth link and iPod dock that you pay extra for. Not to mention Microsoft hasn't even come close to releasing a version of Windows requiring a yearly subscription. Sure they talked about it, but the reaction from the community was enough to stem that tide.

I don't know about you, but I don't have to break any laws or void any warranties to get into MMC or the registry or the hardware manager. This part of your analogy seems to be aimed that the idea that windows is closed source but its completely flawed. A better analogy would be that its really freaking hard to cast all your own parts to build an engine from scratch... which is true.

Kill switch that other drivers control? I don't even understand this. Unless your talking about domain controllers having the ability to forcibly shutdown or restart an AD attached computer... but then your analogy would be like to stupid go carts which the pissy little 16yr old attendants turn a rev limiter on just because you bumped your friend a bit...

15 manufacturers to get a basic car? If opera and mozilla have their way that might have some semblance of truth, but the base windows install (excluding drivers) is all Microsoft. Most cars have after marked parts from dozens of companies, why shouldn't an operating system? If you want to bitch about mismatched software and wedged in modules go take a look at a linux depot.

You have a point about the whole driving legally thing, but when a company can argue that ~30% of China doesn't use a valid copy of their product, I think they get some leeway.

When was the last time your local car shop issued a recall on your car? What? Never? You mean its the manufacturer that discovers and fixes all those problems? Oh man... what a shock. I guess that's the state of closed engineering these days...

P.S. You only have mandatory product activation if you buy a retail version of the software and install it yourself, OEM comes pre-activated. In a way, that product activation is like you getting the title to your car. If you buy from a dealership, they do all the paperwork and everything comes to you automatically in the mail. If you build your own car or buy it used, you have to fill out a few forms and get them notarized and approved before you're technically allowed to drive it legally. Again, when their software is pirated so much, they do have the right to try to protect it. That isn't greed, that is intelligent business.

adeelarshad82 quotes AppScount.com with this disconcerting bit from what many people rank the world's best-connected country: "YouTube users in Korea are no longer able to upload new videos or comment on existing ones. The changes come in response to the country's recent Cyber Defamation Law. Enacted on April 1st, the law requires users of all sites with more than 100,000 uniques a day to provide real names and national ID numbers, in order to curb anonymous comments."

Not to try to bring this thread down... but Christians and Muslims have been fighting over political dominance for 15 centuries. Russia and China have been struggling for political relevance for decades. India and Brazil are currently trying to set themselves up as world leaders... Renewable energy isn't going to change any of this. There are people in the world who just want power. There are others in this world who want to be the only ones in it (see the Holocaust, Darfur, Sudan, Gaza, Palestine, South Africa, Iran, Iraq and others for modern day examples... the Crusades, the Hun, the Spanish Inquisition and others for historic references).
Cheap, renewable energy isn't going to solve the world's problems because scarcity or resources is only one driving force behind the atrocities we see daily and by no means does it trump fundamentalist idiocracy.

Seems you merely played the closed beta or the first week of the slightly less closed beta. The game evolved a lot over the second beta and is most definitely worth playing now... even with sycophants like your self running-a-muck.